Games freeze, then continue normally

[SoulAssassin]

AFAIK, my friend's PC only will freeze for a few seconds during a game and then move on normally throughout the game as if nothing happened, kind of like lag on an Internet game, only it happens locally. Issue is, I'm not getting the PC till tomorrow, but I know it's an HP Pavilion (Model # unknown). It has a Celeron 700, 192MB RAM, 30GB HDD (20GB free), ATI Radeon 32MB SDRAM vid card on Win ME.

The games can freeze during local games or Internet games even after an upgrade of video drivers and directx 8.1b. I think it might be a problem with either the pwr supply since I think the Pavilions came with 150W pwr supplies (possibly bad?) or the video card degrading (and it's PCI,but no choice, ughh). Anyone have any ideas or have seen this before? I'm just trying to brainstorm before I finally work on this PC.

 

[dumdum]

I had a similiar problem with a 1Ghz Celeron Oc'd to 1.2Ghz. Even though it was Overclocked, 384mb of system mem, and a Gforce2mx card with 32mb on the card I would still have problems running newer games. Try running Mad Onions 3DMark benchmarking program and see if you get the same response. If so it's the machine. The CPU just chokes trying to run newer games. We are always looking for new members at our computer forums:

http://forums.jlrforum.net

Please come join our community too.

 

[denodave]

Celerons do not have the same kind of video processing capabilities as the P-3; Celerons below 800mhz also run only on 66mhz bus, which adds to your problem. The on-chip cache is of a different design (possibly smaller, too) than P-3, and the reports I have seen indicate that the limitations of the Celeron are seen at their worst when playing intense games.

Getting back to bus speed issue: remember that the bus speed is going to seriously affect the disk-to-cpu transfer. I am betting that this stalling behavior is the result of the cpu spending most all it's power to transfer to hard disk and letting the video lag while it does so. A 700mhz P-3 wouldn't have so much difficulty doing this because it runs on a 100 or 133mhz bus. So overclocking in this case isn't going to help much.

You might be able to tweak some windows settings to change page file size for the video data and see what happens.

Good luck. By the way, if it's running ME - get rid of that OS for goodness' sake! Email me! denodave@yahoo.com
Real men pray...especially techies!

 

[paparazi]

I think you answered your own question!
A combination of: boarderline processing power and memory bandwidth.
Power hungry OS in Win ME.
Low spec graphics card with SDram, and a PCI interface (the SDram 32mb Radeon is not much quicker than the older TNT2's and Voodoo 3 cards)
You maybe able to improve his predicament by turning everything off that is running in the background.
Martin Please let members know if there advice has helped any.

 

[SoulAssassin]

I had him turn everything off except Explorer and systray and still had the same problem. These games were running fine for awhile (6-8 months) and now this started. I might format the system when I get it, but it's just wierd that it would happen all of a sudden and everything else works fine...these things happen in his Star Trek Games.